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A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’
(JTA) — Jeremy Dauber subtitles his new biography of Mel Brooks “Disobedient Jew.” It’s a phrase that captures two indivisible aspects of the 96-year-old director, actor, producer and songwriter.
The “Jew” is obvious. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks channeled the Yiddish accents and Jewish sensibilities of his old neighborhoods into characters like the 2000 Year Old Man — a comedy routine he worked up with his friend, the writer and director Carl Reiner. He worked Jewish obsessions into films like 1967’s “The Producers,” which features two scheming Jewish characters who stage a sympathetic Broadway musical about Hitler in order to bilk their investors.
Brooks’ signature move is to inject Jews into every aspect of human history and culture, which can be seen in the forthcoming Hulu series “History of the World, Part II.” A sequel to his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I,” it parodies historical episodes in a style he honed as a writer on 1950s television programs such as “Your Show of Shows,” whose writers’ rooms were stocked with a galaxy of striving Jewish comedy writers just like him.
The “Disobedient” part describes Brooks’ relationship to a movie industry that he conquered starting in the early 1970s. In a series of parodies of classic movie genres — the Western in “Blazing Saddles,” the horror movie in “Young Frankenstein,” Alfred Hitchcock in “High Anxiety — he would gently, sometimes crudely and always lovingly bite the hand that was feeding him quite nicely: In 1976, he was fifth on the list of top 10 box office attractions, just behind Clint Eastwood.
Dauber describes the parody Brooks mastered as “nothing less than the essential statement of American Jewish tension between them and us, culturally speaking; between affection for the mainstream and alienation from it.”
Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, whose previous books include “Jewish Comedy” and “American Comics: A History.” “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” is part of the Jewish Lives series of brief interpretative biographies from Yale University Press.
Dauber and I spoke about why America fell for a self-described “spectacular Jew” from Brooklyn, Brooks’ lifelong engagement with the Holocaust, and why “Young Frankenstein” may be Brooks’ most Jewish movie.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “History of the World, Part II” comes out March 6. “History of the World, Part I” may not be in the top tier of Brooks films, but it seems to touch on so many aspects of his career that you trace in your book: the parody of classic movie forms, the musical comedy, injecting Jews into every aspect of human civilization, and the anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.
Jeremy Dauber: I agree. There’s the one thing that really brings it home, and it’s probably the most famous or infamous scene from the film. That’s the Spanish Inquisition scene. You have Brooks sort of probing the limits of bad taste. He had done that most famously in “The Producers” with its Nazi kickline, but here he takes the same idea — that one of the ways that you attack antisemitism is through ridicule — and turns the persecution of the Jews into a big musical number. It’s his love of music and dance. But the thing that’s almost the most interesting about this is that he takes on the role of the Torquemada character.
As his henchman sing and dance and the Jews face torture, the Brooklyn-born Jew plays the Catholic friar who tormented the Jews.
That’s right. And what’s the crime that he accuses the Jews of? “Don‘t be boring! Don‘t be dull!” That’s the worst thing that you can be. It’s his way of saying, “If I have a religion, you know, it is show business.”
His fascination with showbiz seems inseparable from his Jewishness, as if being a showbiz Jew is a denomination in its own right.
One of my favorite lines of his is when he marries [actress] Anne Bancroft, who of course is not Jewish. And he says, “She doesn’t have to convert: She’s a star.” If you’re a star, if you’re a celebrity, you’re kind of in your own firmament faith-wise, and so it’s okay. Showbiz is this faith. But it is very Jewish, because show business is a way to acceptance. It’s a way that America can love him as a Jew, as Mel Brooks, as a kid from the outer boroughs who can grow up to marry Anne Bancroft.
Jeremy Dauber is the author of “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” (Yale University Press)
You write early on that “Mel Brooks, more than any other single figure, symbolizes the Jewish perspective on and contribution to American mass entertainment.” On one foot, can you expand on that?
Jews understand that there’s a path to success and that being embraced by a culture means learning about it, immersing yourself in it, being so deeply involved in it that you understand it and master it. But simultaneously, you’re doing that as a kind of outsider. You’re always not quite in it, even though you’re of it in some deep way. In some ways, it’s the apotheosis of what Brooks does, which is being a parodist. In order to be the kind of parodist that Mel Brooks is, you have to be acutely attuned to every aspect of the cultural medium that you’re parodying. You have to know it inside and outside and backwards and forwards. And Brooks certainly does, but at the same time you have to be able to sort of step outside of it and say, you know, “Well, I’m watching a Western, but come on, what’s going on with these guys? Like why doesn’t anyone ever, you know, pass gas after eating so many beans?”
You have this great phrase, that to be an American Jew is to be part of the “loyal opposition.”
That’s right. Brooks at his best is always kind of poking and prodding at convention, but loyally. He’s not like the countercultural figures of his day. He’s a studio guy. He’s really within the system, but is poking at the system as well.
You wrote in that vein about his 1963 short film, “The Critic,” which won him an Oscar. Brooks plays an old Jewish man making fun of an art film.
On the one hand, he’s doing it in the voice of one of his older Jewish relatives, the Jewish generation with an Eastern European accent, to make fun of these kinds of intellectuals. He’s trying to channel the everyman’s response to high art. “What is this I’m watching? I don’t understand this at all.” On the other hand, Brooks is much more intellectual than he’s often given credit for.
For me the paradox of Brooks’ career is conveyed in a phrase that appears a couple of times in the book: “too Jewish.” The irony is that the more he leaned into his Jewishness, the more successful he got, starting with the “2000 Year Old Man” character, in which he channels Yiddish dialect in a series of wildly successful comedy albums with his friend Carl Reiner. How do you explain America’s embrace of these extremely ethnic tropes?
Brooks’ great motion pictures of the late 1960s and 1970s sort of track with America’s embrace of Jewishness. You have “The Graduate,” which came out at around the same time as “The Producers,” and which showed that someone like Dustin Hoffman can be a leading man. It doesn’t have to be a Robert Redford. You have Allan Sherman and all these popular Jewish comedians. You have “Fiddler on the Roof” becoming one of Broadway’s biggest hits. That gives Brooks license to kind of jump in with both feet. In the 1950s, writing on “The Show of Shows” for Sid Caesar, the Jewishness was there but in a very kind of hidden way. Whereas, it’s very hard to watch the 2000 Year Old Man and say, well, that’s not a Jewish product.
What he also avoided — and here I will contrast him with the novelist Philip Roth — were accusations that he was “bad for the Jews.” Philip Roth was told that his negative portrayals of Jewish characters was embarrassing the Jews in front of the gentiles, but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone complaining even though the Max Bialystock character in “The Producers” can be fairly described as a conniving Jew. What made Brooks’ ethnic comedy more palatable to other Jews?
“The Producers” had a lot of pushback, but for a lot of other reasons.
I guess people had enough to deal with when he staged a musical comedy about Hitler.
Exactly. But the other part is that his biggest films are not as explicitly Jewish as something like Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I actually think “Young Frankenstein” is one of the most Jewish movies that Mel Brooks ever made, but you’re not going to watch “Young Frankenstein” and say, wow, there are Jews all over the place here.
What about “Young Frankenstein,” a parody of classic horror movies, seems quintessentially Jewish?
The script, which is a lot of Gene Wilder and not just Mel Brooks, is really about someone saying, “You know, I don’t have this heritage — I’m trying to fit in with everybody else. My name is Dr. FRAHNK-en-shteen.” And then people say, “No, this is your heritage. You are Dr. Frankenstein.” [Wilder’s character realizes] “it is my heritage, and I’m embracing it. And I’m Frankenstein. And you may find that monstrous but that’s your business.” It’s about assimilation and embracing who you are.
And of course, Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein is unmistakably Jewish, even when he plays a cowboy in “Blazing Saddles.”
Right. Again, by the mid-’70s, you know, you have Gene Wilder and Elliot Gould and Dustin Hoffman, all Jews, in leading roles. “Young Frankenstein” ends up being a movie about coming home and embracing identity, which is playing itself out a lot in American Jewish culture in the 1970s.
I guess I have to go back and watch it for the 14th time with a different point of view.
That’s the fun part of my job.
You talk about what’s happening at the same time as Brooks’ huge success, which is, although he’s a little younger, the emergence of Woody Allen. You describe Brooks and Woody Allen as the voice of American Jewish comedy, but in very different ways. What are the major differences?
Gene Wilder, who worked with both of them, says that working with Allen is like lighting these tiny little candles, and with Brooks, you’re making big atom bombs. The critical knock against Brooks was that he was much more interested in the joke than the story. And I think with the exception maybe of “Young Frankenstein” there’s a lot of truth to that. The jokes are phenomenal, so that’s fine. Allen pretty quickly moved towards a much more narrative kind of film, and so began to be seen as this incredibly intellectual figure. In real life, Allen always claimed that he wasn’t nearly as intellectual as everyone thought, while Brooks had many more kinds of intellectual ambitions than the movie career that he had. There is a counterfactual world in which “The 12 Chairs,” his 1970 movie based on a novel by two Russian Jewish novelists and which nobody talks about, makes a ton of money.
Instead, it bombs, and he makes “Blazing Saddles,” which works out very well for everybody.
Although he does create Brooksfilms, and produces more narrative, serious-minded films like “The Elephant Man” and “84 Charing Cross Road.”
Right, and decides that if he puts his name on these as a director, they’re going to be rejected out of hand. There is a shelf of scholarship on Woody Allen, but if you look at who had influence on America in terms of box office and popularity, it’s Brooks winning in a walk.
You also mention Brooks and Steven Spielberg in the same sentence. Why do they belong together?
Partly because they had huge popular success in the mid-’70s. Brooks is a generation older, but they are hitting their cinematic success at the same time. And they are both movie fans.
Which comes out in their work — Brooks in his film parodies and Spielberg in the films that echo the films he loved as kid.
Until maybe his remake of “West Side Story,” Spielberg is not really a theater guy in the way that Brooks is, when success meant to make it on Broadway. When Brooks was winning all those Tonys in 2001 for the Broadway musical version of “The Producers,” it may have been almost more meaningful for his 5-year-old, or 7- or 8-year-old self than making his incredibly popular pictures.
You also write about Brooks being a small “c” conservative, a bit of a square. Which I think will surprise people who think about the fart jokes and the peepee jokes and all that stuff. And by square, I mean, kind of old showbizzy, even a little prudish sometimes.
I think that’s right. There’s a great moment that I quote at the end of the book where they are trying out the musical version of “The Producers,” and they want to put the word “f–k” in and Brooks is like, “I don’t know if we can do that on Broadway,” and Nathan Lane is like, “Have we met? You’re Mel Brooks!” He’s a 1950s guy.
Another place where this kind of conservatism comes in is when you compare him to other comedians of the 1950s and ’60s — the so-called “sick comics” like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl who were pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter and politics. He wasn’t part of that. He was part of Hollywood. He was trying to make it in network television.
There is an interview in that era when he complained that people who are writing for television are not “dangerous.” Meanwhile, he himself was writing for television. But I think it’s fair to say that “The Producers” was really something different. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be offended by “The Producers.” But as we were saying before, he is more of the loyal opposition, rather than sort of truly out there. He’s not making “Easy Rider.”
An exhibit space at the Museum of Broadway evokes the scenery from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
“The Producers” is part of Brooks’ lifelong gambit of mocking the Nazis, I think starting when he would sing anti-Hitler songs as a GI in Europe at the tail end of World War II. Later he would remake Jack Benny’s World War II-era anti-Nazi comedy, “To Be or Not to Be.” And then there is the quick “Hitler on Ice” gag in “History of the World, Part I.” Brooks always maintains that mocking Nazis is the ultimate revenge on them, while you note that Woody Allen in “Manhattan” makes almost the opposite argument: that the way to fight white supremacists is with bricks and baseball bats. Did you come down on one side or the other?
To add just a twinge of complication is the fact that Brooks actually fought Nazis, and also had a brother who was shot down in combat. So for me to sit in moral judgment on anybody who fought in World War II is not a place that I want to be. What’s interesting is that Brooks makes a lot of these statements over the course of a career in which Nazism is done, in the past, defeated. Tragically, the events of the last number of years made white supremacy and neo-Nazism a live question again. When “The Producers” was staged as a musical in the early 21st century, people could say, “Okay, Nazism’s time has passed.” It’s not clear to me that we would restage “The Producers” now as a musical on Broadway, when just last week you had actual neo-Nazis handing out their literature outside a Broadway show. It would certainly be a lot more laden than it was in 2001.
Time also caught up with Brooks in his depiction of LGBT characters. Gay characters are the punchlines in “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles” in ways that have not aged well. But you also note how both movies are about two men who love each other, to the exclusion of women.
There’s an emotive component to him about these male relationships. Bialystok and Bloom [the protagonists in “The Producers”] is a kind of love story. One of the interesting things is that as it became comparatively more comfortable for gay men to live their truth in society and in Hollywood, there was an evolution. In that remake of “To Be or Not to Be,” there is a much more sympathetic gay character who’s not stereotypical.
What other aspects of Brooks’ Jewishness have we not touched upon? For instance, he’s not particularly interested in Judaism as a religion, and ritual and theology rarely come up in his films, even to be mocked.
It’s not something that he’s particularly interested in. To him, being Jewish is a voice and a language. From the beginning of his career the voice is there. What he’s saying in these accents is that this is Jewish history working through me. It is, admittedly, a very narrow slice of Jewish history.
The first- and second-generation children of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish.
It was a Jewishness that was aspirational. It was intellectual. It was a musical Jewishness. It was not in the way we use this phrase now, but it was a cultural Jewishness. It was not a synagogue Jewishness or a theological Jewishness. But of course he is Jewish, deeply Jewish. He couldn’t be anything else. And so he didn’t, and thank God for that.
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This isn’t just a dance group; it’s a model for what coexistence could look like
There are three of them onstage. Arielle Rosales, a Mexican Puerto-Rican Jew from the Lower East Side, is dancing flamenco. Amanda Castro, a Brooklyn-born Puerto-Rican from New Haven, is tapping. And Brinda Guha, a Bengali-Indian from New Jersey, is doing Kathak — a form of Indian classical dance. They’re three performers raised in different artistic traditions who became a trio a decade ago.
But as Soles of Duende, these artists never wanted to create a “fusion” that blurs or erases their identities, cultures, dance styles, or legacies. Nothing is stripped of its history or blended beyond recognition.
“We’re not trying to make a smoothie. We’re trying to make a fruit salad,” Rosales told me. “We want you to be able to pick up the pineapple and pick up the watermelon and pick up the mango.”
Together, the women move. They vocalize. They invent rhythms and songs with their feet. The sounds of Castro’s taps, Rosales’s heels, and Guha’s ghungroos — multi-tiered strings of bells that wrap from the ankles up toward the shins and calves — are just as much a part of the music played by their three counterparts in their band: a percussionist, an electric guitarist and a trumpeter.
You can hear these percussive dance forms and you can feel them, too, mingling and building, filling the air and shaking the room in rehearsals.
‘Carrying the blessing and burden of tradition’
The collaboration started as a one-off project. Rosales and Guha were friends, their paths having crossed at Broadway Dance Center, a popular New York City studio where Rosales taught flamenco and Guha ran what was then called the International Student Visa Program. In 2016, they applied to create a short piece and participate in a show together.
“We wanted to do a trio of three different percussive styles,” said Rosales. “We wanted a third sound.” They found it in Castro, who wowed Guha with a tap solo she performed at a competition.
“I was so enthralled with the fact that there were other women percussive dancers making space for other women percussive dancers,” Castro said. “There are still people who think percussive dance is a less-than art form,” she said. “It is something that never gets the flowers that it deserves.”
What started with an eight-minute piece at an experimental theater on the Lower East Side led to a year-long residency that culminated in a full-length production. The question explicit in its title “Can We Dance Here?” reflects the challenges they faced finding rehearsal spaces. Practitioners of percussive forms often find themselves in a perpetual search for floors they can dance on and spaces that will welcome, or at least tolerate, them.
“It was about permission,” Guha said, both literal and philosophical. Not just can we use this floor, she said, but: “Do we have permission to mess with tradition like this? Do we have permission to [have a] dialogue with each other and change a couple of rules?”
Over time, their questions evolved, Guha added: “How far can we go with this thing? How close to our humanity can we get through the form of percussive dance?” They stopped asking for permission as much, though they continue to seek a balance between honoring established practices and pushing them forward.
“All three of us are both carrying the blessing and burden of tradition,” said Guha, who started learning Kathak from her mother, an immigrant from Kolkata, India, at the small dance school she ran out of their garage. “I grew up with lots of students in the house. I grew up with ghungroos, our bells, literally jingling in our house all day long.”
Guha went on to study with other teachers, including in India, much as Rosales inherited the traditions of flamenco not only in New York City, but also in flamenco meccas in Spain and New Mexico. Castro learned about tap legacies and lineages in bits and pieces, from Fred Astaire movies to classes with icons like Jason Samuels Smith.
“The three of us are really open to breaking a lot of rules,” Guha said, “as long as we know what rules we’re breaking and why.”
They bonded fast, not only as artists with shared sensibilities, Rosales said: “We became family pretty quickly.”
‘We’re doing it in each of our own ways”
Two hours into rehearsal, Soles of Duende is floating in and out of choreography, trying steps, checking cues with the musicians, chatting and smiling, making jokes and scat singing rhythms for each other. You can see them through a glass storefront in East Harlem, an unassuming studio tucked between a corner laundromat and a stoop draped with a Puerto Rican flag, under which a few men gather around a card table.
Here at the Rhythmic Arts Center, they’re rehearsing sections from “The Kitchen,” a full-length production the group is currently developing. The show pays homage to the traditions and cultures that shaped them — all of which value gathering around food — and explores family dynamics, celebration, ritual, hardship, and connection. The kitchen, Castro said, looms large as a communal place where families show up, break bread, fight at the table, announce big news, and meet new people.
“We also have a deep, deep love of food,” Guha said, explaining that the three dancers and the band often eat together, whether they’re going out during tour dates, cooking for each other, or hanging out and talking about cooking shows on TV. “We gather around food at all times. When we’re sad, when we’re mad, when we’re creative, when we’re stuck.”
Indeed, inside the rehearsal space, there’s a plate of fruit set out on a bench. The floor vibrates, knocking over the phone Castro set up to film one of their final runs before the next day’s performance. She scurries over to prop it back up, then gives up. It’s no match for them as they dance for and with each other.
“The Kitchen” is about “nostalgia and culture and all of that, but it’s not just that,” Rosales said. “Each of our sounds, each of our instruments is an ingredient, and when you let it simmer, we literally are cooking up something live.”
Watching them close up, it’s striking to pick out moments when these three dancers are performing a phrase seemingly in unison, only to notice that they are each executing slightly different steps using distinct dance vocabularies. If the common thread for a particular step is bringing both arms up overhead and then back down to rest by the sides of the body, they have to ask themselves: What would that look like in tap, flamenco, and Kathak?
The result often looks so smooth — a 2022 New York Times review called their show “a treasure and a triumph” and they graced the March 2024 cover of Dance Magazine — that it belies the struggle it takes to compose coherent, polished choreography out of three different cultural forms and artistic languages.
“We get a lot of people that think they see the quote-unquote product and say, ‘Oh you guys you work so well together!’ And that’s true,” Rosales said. But the ultimate cohesion rarely comes easily. Sometimes they’ll spend a three-hour rehearsal choreographing just one minute of new material. “It is so hard to come up with these things, and it comes with a lot of blocks,” she said, “a lot of friction and sometimes arguments.”
They’ve learned along the way when they need to put an idea in the “parking lot” to deal with later, when they need to sit down and talk, when they need to admit their brains are mush, when they need to explain or understand something about one of their dance forms, and when they need to remember their shared goals.
“We’ve named the idea Greta,” Castro said. “So when we are not on the same page, we say, ‘Greta, what is the answer? … What does the work need?’ Then our feelings can’t get in the way.”
At about 9 p.m., it’s time to call it quits. The dancers, musicians, and Greta all seem satisfied. They’re ready for their show the following evening.
‘Talk to each other and with each other’
First they argue about rice. In an excerpt from “The Kitchen” they perform the next day, the three women congregate over an invisible pot. With all these cooks in the kitchen, Castro tells the audience, “you can imagine that each of them thinks that their pot of rice is the best pot of rice.”
“This is burnt!” one exclaims. Another slaps a hand away: “Get your hand out my pot.”
On this particular evening in August, Soles is the opening act on the opening night of the Battery Dance Festival. The annual event is held on an outdoor stage in a waterfront park at the southern tip of Manhattan, next door to the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
“Part of the mission of the festival is to break down barriers between people, between cultures, introduce new forms of dance to the audience members, and to bring people together,” said Battery Dance’s executive director Emad Salem. “They perfectly embody that mission,” he said, “coming together in this seamless way.”
Though the sky is gray and heavy with the threat of rain, the amphitheater-style seats are packed. And while it started drizzling earlier during the group’s tech rehearsal — leading to a scramble to cover equipment and altering the sound of the wooden flooring onstage — the audience is none the wiser.
Standing behind the last row of seats, Curtis Thomas can’t help but dance along as he cheers and applauds. “It’s just so vibrant. All of the energy comes right at you,” said Thomas, who is a dancer himself. “It immediately opens you up somehow. And I love the way it’s just so multidisciplinary and the way that all of the styles and forms of dance and music talk to each other and with each other.”
The symbolism of the scene is almost too much. Dancing against the backdrop of the Hudson River flowing into New York Harbor, with the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island visible in the distance, Soles of Duende demonstrates in dance what might be possible outside of it. At a time of entrenched polarization, they show you, Castro said, “what the dreamscape could be or a current reality could be.”
“When people see us performing, it really is a true example and testament to coexistence,” Rosales said. Whether they’re onstage or off, they can converse without changing who they are or how they speak. No one has to dim or diminish themselves. And “just like any musical form, we have to listen to each other.”
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Tidbits: This Jewish couple gives homeless dogs a free makeover
Tidbits is a Forverts feature of easy news briefs in Yiddish that you can listen to or read, or both! If you read the article and don’t know a word, just click on it and the translation appears. Listen to the report here:
אַ גרויסער בלאָער משׂא־פֿור האָט זיך אָפּגעשטעלט אויף אַ גאַס אין סקיד־ראָו, אַ באַקאַנטער אָרעמער געגנט אין לאָס־אַנדזשעלעס, פֿאַר אַ היימלאָזן מענטש מיט אַ הינטל.
„אײַער הינטל וויל אפֿשר מע זאָל אים צופּוצן אַ ביסל?“ האָט דער מאַן אינעם אויטאָ געפֿרעגט. לכתּחילה האָט דער היימלאָזער אויסגעזען צעטומלט. דערנאָך האָט ער געגעבן אַ קוק אויף זײַן הינטל, וואָס ער האָט שוין ווער ווייסט ווי לאַנג נישט געבאָדן אָדער אָפּגעשוירן, און צוגעשאָקלט מיטן קאָפּ.
מיט אַ שעה שפּעטער איז דאָס הינטל אַרויס פֿונעם משׂא־פֿור, אויסזעענדיק ווי אַ גאָר אַנדער הינטל. זײַן פֿעל, וואָס איז פֿריִער געווען שמוציק און פֿאַרפּלאָנטערט, האָט מען אויסגעוואַשן, צוגעשוירן און געבערשט ביז ער איז געוואָרן ווייך און גלאַנציק. איידער ער איז אַרויס פֿון אויטאָ האָט מען אים געגעבן אַ נאַש, וואָס ער האָט פֿריילעך אײַנגעשלונגען.
די אָרגאַניזאַציע וואָס האָט אויסגעבאָדן דאָס הינטל, „האָליוווּד מאָביל גרומינג“, באַלאַנגט צו טשאָק און יעל רובין. במשך פֿון די פֿאַרגאַנגענע 11 יאָר, האָבן זיי און זייערע מיטאַרבעטער גערייניקט בערך 5,000 הינט פֿרײַ פֿון אָפּצאָל.
דאָס פּאָרפֿאָלק, וואָס האָט אימיגרירט פֿון ישׂראל, האָט אין 2001 לאַנצירט אַ געשעפֿט וואָס ברענגט אַ לוקסוס־ספּאַ צו פֿאַרמעגלעכע אייגנטימער פֿון הינט. אָבער דערנאָך האָבן זיי באַשלאָסן אַז זיי ווילן אויך העלפֿן די מענטשן מיט הינט, וואָס קענען נישט באַצאָלן דערפֿאַר: סײַ הינט וואָס געפֿינען זיך אין אַ מיקלט פֿאַר חיות, סײַ הינט וואָס וווינען מיט זייערע אייגנטימער אויף דער גאַס.
„אַ מאָל האָבן די אייגנטימער מורא אונדז איבערצוגעבן די הינט, אַפֿילו אויב זיי קענען וואַרטן אין דרויסן,“ האָט יעל געזאָגט. „מיר לאָזן זיי אַרײַנקומען און זען וואָס מיר טוען. די הינט פֿילן זיך אויך בעסער. מע קען זען וויפֿל זיי האָבן הנאה פֿון דער באַהאַנדלונג און ווי עס שפּאַנט זיי אויס. דו ווײַזט זיי ליבע, גיסט זיי אַ נאַש, וואַסער צו טרינקען, און זיי באַצאָלן דיר מיט זייערע קושן.“
אויף דער פֿראַגע, צי זיי זאָרגן זיך נישט, וואָס וועט זײַן ווען די הינט גייען צוריק צו די האַרבע באַדינגונגען פֿון דער גאַס, האָט טשאָק באַטאָנט עטלעכע זאַכן: „זייערע אייגנטימער זענען תּמיד מיט זיי און פּאַסן אויף אויף זיי וויפֿל זיי קענען נאָר. די הינטלעך זענען זייערע ׳קינדער׳. עס זענען אויך דאָ אַ סך אָרגאַניזאַציעס וואָס באַזאָרגן זיי מיט עסן אומזיסט און אַנדערע זאַכן. זיי פֿאַרמאָגן ווייניק, אָבער זיי טוען דאָס בעסטע אויפֿצופּאַסן אויף זייערע הינט.“
צו לייענען וועגן דעם אויף ענגליש גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
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The tech worker campaigning for ‘Antisemite of the Week’ doesn’t want to talk about antisemitism
After accusations of discrimination led his San Francisco Tech Week event to be pulled from the schedule, a tech worker has decided to embrace his newfound notoriety.
Mostapha Benhenda cited security reasons last week when he denied an Israeli programmer admission to his AI hackathon event, explaining that he didn’t want the Israeli army to make participants’ electronics “explode in their faces and injure them.”
The Israeli tech worker — a former Israeli soldier named Adam Levi — posted the message online, leading sponsors to pull funding for the event. In the days since, Benhenda has begun openly campaigning for an “Antisemite of the Week” award from pro-Israel watchdog group StopAntisemitism.
“I am a competitor, I play to win, this prize will be my Ballon d’Or,” Benhenda said in a message to the Forward, referring to the annual prize for the world’s best soccer player.
Running this week through Sunday, San Francisco Tech Week draws tens of thousands of tech industry workers to hundreds of panels, competitions and parties across the Bay Area.
The saga began Sept. 29 when Levi posted a screenshot of Benhenda’s messages rejecting his RSVP to the event, called “Build Your Agentic Investment Bank Hackathon.” A page for the hackathon on the digital invitation platform Partiful claimed it had been co-sponsored by Tech Week and the convention’s founder, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Levi’s post was reshared on X more than 1,000 times, leading to the event’s de-listing by Tech Week organizers, who said on X that the event had violated the program’s terms of service.
Levi told The Algemeiner that Andreessen Horowitz told him the company had removed its sponsorship.
Benhenda, whose LinkedIn says he attended college in France, declined to participate in phone interviews. But in messages to the Forward, his response to accusations of antisemitism appeared to shift over a manner of days from defensiveness to bemusement.
When first reached for comment, Benhenda denied that his rejection of Levi was antisemitic at all. He said he banned Levi because his LinkedIn indicated service in the Israeli military’s secretive Unit 8200 during September 2024, when the intelligence unit was linked to the simultaneous detonation of thousands of pagers owned by Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon. (Levi declined to be interviewed, but said on X that “building explosive pagers was never my thing.”)
“I understand Adam’s disappointment, and his resulting emotional accusation of antisemitism, but he perfectly knows it’s unfounded,” Benhenda wrote Sept. 29, adding, “I hope that over the next weeks he will get more clarity about this.”
However, after StopAntisemitism posted about Benhenda on X, he seemed to lose interest in contesting the claim — and began leaning into it instead.
On Saturday, Benhenda shared StopAntisemitism’s post about him with a request.
“I am competing for the ‘Antisemite of the Week’ award at the San Francisco Tech Week,” he wrote. “Can you show your support/hate with a retweet?”
Founded in 2018 by a social media influencer who goes by Liora Rez, StopAntisemitism.org frequently bestows its “Antisemite of the Week” awards to public figures — a mix of elected officials, civic leaders and celebrities — who antagonize Israel.
Recent recipients of the award — which is not actually awarded weekly — have included actor Javier Bardem and Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Last month, StopAntisemitism sponsored an event where a speaker was later criticized for Islamophobic rhetoric. (Rez did not respond to a request for comment on that story, or for this one.)
Benhenda said in messages to the Forward on Monday afternoon that he did not know very much about the organization, but that he was pining for its distinction, given the group’s 350,000 followers on X.
“What matters isn’t the label, but who puts it,” he added. “Go big or go home, that’s the game in the Silicon Valley.”
Later, though, Benhenda insisted that he still did not understand the accusations of antisemitism against him. His refusal of Levi, he said, had been solely due to Levi’s involvement in the Israeli military.
Meanwhile, he is forging ahead with the hackathon, hosting it Tuesday on the streaming platform Discord for nearly 200 registered participants.
Benhenda blamed the “tremendous lobbying from the Zionist lobby” for the change. But the venue where he had initially planned to host the event indicated there was no change. The supposed host, a coworking space called Frontier Tower, said in an email it had never booked Benhenda’s event to begin with.
The post The tech worker campaigning for ‘Antisemite of the Week’ doesn’t want to talk about antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
